Jason Anderson wasn't even supposed to be on the Deepwater Horizon that day. Anderson had been with the rig since it launched from a South Korean shipyard in 2001. By 2010, the Bay City, Texas, man had risen to senior tool pusher, akin to a foreman on a construction site.

Anderson was transferring to another rig, and went out to the Deepwater Horizon to train his replacement, says his widow, Shelley. When he arrived, the trainee wasn't there, but Jason stayed over to clean out his locker and spend just a little more time with his "rig brothers."

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Aaron Dale Burkeen, 37, Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Known to friends and family as "Big D" or simple "Bubba," Burkeen's favorite television show was "Man vs. Wild," about people dropped into the wilderness. He once told his sister: "Anything ever happens to me on that rig, I will make it. I'll float to an island somewhere. Y'all don't give up on me, 'cuz I will make it."

Burkeen was a crane operator on the Deepwater Horizon and had worked for Transocean for a decade before the disaster. Survivors said the blast blew him off a catwalk, and that he fell more than 50 feet to the deck.

He left behind a wife, Rhonda, and two children.

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Donald "Duck" Clark, 49, of Newellton, Louisiana.

Sheila Clark says her late husband liked his job as an assistant driller on the Deepwater Horizon. But the avid fisherman and family man "never really enjoyed leaving home."

"He left that job out there, he really did," says his widow, who was in her mid-20s when relatives introduced her to Clark when he moved back to Newellton. "If I would ask him about it, he would express (that) he didn't want to talk about it. 'Don't worry about it. I don't want to talk about it.'"

They were married for 20 years and had four children. Unlike most of the other families, Sheila Clark chose not to have an empty grave for Donald.

"I don't need objects to remind me of him," she says. "I have my children ..."